A Partnership Forged in the Heat of Exchange

It would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. But President Clinton appears to have moved American foreign policy into a close alignment with China, ending the estrangement that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War.

With their second amicable summit meeting in eight months, with a package of deals and a stunningly warm, earthy news conference, Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin have succeeded, at least for now, in forging a new partnership.

In the process, they underscored the enduring nature of America’s old fascination and obsession with China.

Once again, as so often in the past, the United States has decided to put China at the very center of its foreign policy and its global aspirations. It is a process that amazes other countries, and often ends up disappointing the United States itself, but which has recurred from generation to generation since the 19th century.

Despite the continuing differences over human rights and the Tiananmen Square massacre, Clinton and Jiang made plain that their two governments will now collaborate ever more closely in world affairs, on issues ranging from the spread of nuclear weapons to the international economy.

This new strategic linkup between Washington and Beijing is a development with profound implications for the rest of Asia. Other governments, especially those in India, Japan and Taiwan, now confront a different world--one in which the most powerful nation on the globe and the most populous one seem to be working together to try to influence what happens elsewhere.

“China and the United States are partners, not adversaries,” Jiang declared proudly Saturday. And, indeed, that was the core message of the summit talks.

How did Clinton and Jiang bring this about?

In effect, what the two leaders did was to lance the boil of their disputes over the way China represses political dissent.

Each leader got some, but not all, of what he wanted.

Riveting Exchanges

While the riveting exchanges at Saturday’s news conference showed Clinton challenging Jiang Zemin head-on, they also demonstrated that the American president was accepting the legitimacy of China’s Communist Party leader.

Thus, Jiang--tilting his head back with closed eyes and fiddling impassively with his watch as Clinton spoke about the Tiananmen Square massacre--was able to show the Chinese television audience that the American leader was treating him as an equal.

And Clinton--turning his head sideways, in a favorite pose, to display his clenched jaw--could demonstrate to American viewers that he was willing to condemn Chinese repression.

Jiang was able to tolerate Clinton’s rebuke because his rhetoric is no longer backed up by threats, conditions or policy changes.

For other countries, the impact of the Clinton-Jiang summit was, if anything, even more startling.

What happened Saturday is not likely to go down well in India, the world’s second-most-populous nation, which just last month conducted nuclear tests and which has been warning that it confronts a military threat from China.

The Clinton-Jiang summit made no gestures of acceptance or conciliation to India--or, for that matter, to Pakistan, which followed India’s nuclear tests with its own.

India’s new Hindu nationalist leadership has been arguing that it has the right to develop nuclear weapons and join the nuclear club, just as China did in 1964.

Instead, the American and Chinese leaders issued a “joint statement on South Asia,” one that simply refused to accept the legitimacy of India and Pakistan as nuclear powers.

China as Partner

The statement called on India and Pakistan to stop all nuclear testing, to refrain from producing or deploying nuclear weapons and to avoid testing or deploying missiles that can deliver nuclear weapons. Thus, the United States is treating China as a partner in keeping the peace in South Asia, rather than as one of the parties to the conflict there.

The results of the Clinton-Jiang summit will probably be equally galling to Japan, though officials in Tokyo undoubtedly will be more diplomatic and restrained in public than their counterparts in New Delhi.

The mere logistics of Clinton’s Beijing summit were already unsettling enough to Japan.

The president is spending nine days in China without making so much as an overnight stop in Japan, Washington’s principal ally in Asia and the host to about 40,000 U.S. troops.

“This trip has sat badly with Japan,” said former U.S. Ambassador to China James R. Lilley, who was just in Tokyo. “They are pissed off. Clinton’s trip is really in Japan’s face.”

The huge entourage of Cabinet members, Congress members and other prominent U.S. officials that Clinton escorted to China far exceeds any American delegation to Japan--excluding perhaps the exceptional one brought by President Bush, not for business purposes but for Emperor Hirohito’s funeral.

Frank Dialogue

Moreover, the level of frank public dialogue between Clinton and Jiang on Saturday seemed much more open and friendly than the stilted diplomatic exchanges that characterize summit meetings between Washington and Tokyo. Even after American and Japanese leaders call one another by their first names, they rarely say anything in public.

What will Japanese leaders think, for example, of the way in which Clinton and Jiang at Saturday’s news conference seemed to be teaming up to talk in somewhat patronizing terms about Japan, the world’s second-largest economy?

“I think that, ultimately, President Jiang and I would give anything to be able to just wave a wand and have all of this go away,” said Clinton of Japan’s economic slump.

“We are not the only actors in this drama, and a lot of this must be done by the Japanese government and the Japanese people. We can be supportive, but they have to make the right decisions.”

For Taiwan, the results of Saturday’s summit are likely to be more subtle but in the long run possibly more devastating.

The Clinton administration made plainer than ever that it is ready to enshrine new formulas concerning Taiwan, ones that will further limit the island’s options.

In particular, administration officials are now repeating as a regular refrain what are called the “three nos”--that the United States will not support Taiwan’s independence, that it will not support Taiwan’s entry into the United Nations and that it will not accept some solution to the problem that will create two separate Chinas.

Despite the Clinton administration’s claims that its principles on Taiwan are old hat, they were never articulated in public until eight months ago. Since then, the administration has been repeating these ideas at ever higher levels. And Jiang on Saturday elevated them still further, calling them the American “commitments” about Taiwan.

During the early 1990s, after China’s crackdown at Tiananmen Square and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rest of Asia was worried that the growing enmity between the United States and China could lead to a new Cold War, or even a military conflict.

Now, they have to confront the opposite possibility: The Pacific Rim’s two leading powers may be teaming up with each other.

At one point Saturday, National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger was obliged to caution that Washington’s new relationship will not go too far.

“The nations in this region know that we are not forming an alliance with China,” Berger said.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman uttered similar reassurances. The partnership between the United States and China “is not targeted at any other country,” he said.

The fact that both sides felt compelled to say these things was itself a symbol of the remarkable transformation Clinton and Jiang have wrought.

Once again, the United States and China have gotten hitched.